ABSTRACT
The origins of the copper obtained lay mainly with Cornish producers. To provide a comparison and contrast to the British copper in Matthew Boulton's production, Austro-Hungarian one Kreuzer coins struck from copper mined in that empire were recently sampled and analysed. Besides grain and deformation structures, the etching of the copper also reveals the segregation of individual elements as parallel dark bands. The mean arsenic content of the copper bolts studied was 0.78 per cent and that of the sheathing 0.42 per cent. All the copper has the same broad characteristics: the principal impurities are arsenic, bismuth, lead, silver and, usually, nickel. The sources and the results of the analyses demonstrate that Boulton was using the standard industrial copper of his day with no additional refining or other modification of its composition. The same compositional patterns enable us to identify British copper in the alloy chosen by Boulton for his ormolu.
